Looking for solutions in Long Beach's battle with crime

Costly real estate or residents with high incomes? Luxury stores and high tax brackets?

Those things certainly don't hurt, but the real key to a secure neighborhood is a strong sense of community, police, local leaders and experts agree.

Researchers David McMillan and David Chavis wrote that certain factors must be present for community to exist: emotional safety, a sense of belonging and personal investment.

The Vanderbilt University academics defined a sense of community as "a feeling that members have of belonging, a feeling that members matter to one another and to the group, and a shared faith that members' needs will be met through their commitment to be together."

Residents throughout Long Beach who were interviewed and who were most satisfied with their neighborhood and its crime statistics all described unique, well-defined communities.

Those include Frank Johnston in Belmont Shore, who gets to know all his neighbors -- both renters and homeowners -- when he welcomes newcomers to the block and makes his weekly rounds warning of impending street sweepers; and Lorraine Corbin in North Long Beach, who walks to her local laundromat and visits with her apartment complex neighbors regularly. For them, 2011 seemed to be a good year for city crime.

"Everybody in my apartment complex looks out for one another, we're like a little family," Corbin said. "I think it's pretty good in North Long Beach. We have very good police patrols and we care about each other."

Long Beach Police Chief Jim McDonnell agrees, noting that last year's 9.4 increase in overall Part 1 crimes is still well below the last 10-year average and the department still maintains a 4.2-minute response time to calls for service.

But that sense of community is crucial, the chief said. It can carry an impact equal to, and sometimes greater than, that of arrests and convictions when combating and preventing crime.

"The greater the likelihood that people will report crime, the greater the outcome, and the greater their faith in the legal system," McDonnell said. "That leads to increased confidence in a community, which is going to make a more healthy and successful community."

That is why McDonnell is a strong supporter of his department's Community Oriented Public Safety (COPS) program and its philosophy that police should address the root cause of crime.

Under the program, a handful of patrol officers are taken off the daily rotation to identify the source of significant criminal or nuisance activity in an area and to work with residents, businesses and other city departments to find longterm solutions.

By focusing on the few individuals who create the greatest problems, the chief said, the department avoids old methods of policing that left residents in some neighborhoods feeling like they were being invaded by an occupying force.

Every month, every division commander within the police department meets to discuss what location in the city the COPS program will focus on, Deputy Police Chief Robert Luna said. New locations, or projects, must be introduced every month, and a project isn't deemed completed until calls for service and other issues at the location have been significantly reduced.

COPS at work

Officer Juan Carlos Reyes, who serves on COPS, said one of the most problematic areas within his beat in the North Division is the neighborhood that includes the Del Amo Boulevard and South Street corridors, and from the Los Angeles River to Cherry Avenue.

Though the area is more often marked with high property crimes, there have been spikes in violent crimes -- such as late last year, Luna said.

Reyes showed photos of a recent project at a sober living facility in the area that came onto Reyes' radar following a report of a stabbing and a person at the location with a gun. Police discovered there were two parolees in the complex, one a known gang member; both were involved in that particular incident.

One of the men hit the other in the head with the butt of a rifle following a confrontation, and police arrived and arrested the men before the attack progressed to a shooting, Reyes said.

But the problems inside the small apartment complex extended far beyond those two men.

Photos of the building show trash, mold and vermin. Appalling plumbing conditions added to the many health and code enforcement violations.

In one picture used in Reyes' COPS presentation, the small form of a baby is seen sleeping face down on a dingy, sagging mattress on a floor crowded with debris and surrounded by walls smeared with stains.

That baby, Reyes said, was the motivation for his choosing the location as a COPS project, which involved calling in officials from the city's Health Department, Code Enforcement, Business Licensing, City Council, and the City Attorney's Office.

Working together, the team quickly found out the sober living facility was a property in receivership and bank-owned. It had already been flagged for health code violations, and the property's off-site manager hadn't addressed the problems.

By the time the project was completed, a new manager was in charge of the building, which was put through a complete renovation that closed it off to public access. All but two tenants were were evicted and a security officer was hired.

Subsequently, calls for service to the building, which had numbered well into double digits every month, dropped to only one call for a complaint of music.

That apartment building, Reyes and Luna said, represents how an area branded as bad can be turned into a great community.

"When I first started working (the area) I saw no neighborhood participation, no active neighborhood associations, reported crimes were either up high (in relation to surrounding neighborhoods) or way down, because no one was reporting crimes," Reyes said.

The lack of reported crimes is due to a couple of issues, Reyes and other police officials said. Residents and businesses often become inured to crimes, fear retaliation from criminal elements in the area if they do report crimes and may fear law enforcement due to their status as immigrants.

Now, a year a half later, there are four neighborhood associations in a single police beat, which is just a small section of all North Long Beach. There are also three community watch groups, one business owner's association and one property owners association, Reyes said.

If attendance at the various community meetings falls, Reyes' commander sends officers out to the neighborhood in patrol cars and they use their loud speakers to call residents out of their homes. Thinking it's a lockdown situation, curious people are given informational fliers and updates from the officers on crime trends and tips to avoid problems and how to work together.

Getting residents engaged

The Police Department's support of the neighborhood has been key to its success, said 9th District Councilman Steve Neal.

Neal boasts that his council district is about to welcome its 10th neighborhood association. That might surprise others in the city who have long assumed North Long Beach as disenfranchised and disconnected.

"Having a sense of community, where everyone knows each other, where they look out for each other, where they have each other's back, that's what makes a great neighborhood," Neal said. "You have to have a personal commitment from businesses and residents -- that's how you have less crime."

With that in mind, Neal said, he does everything he can to facilitate community in his district.

His office sends out a weekly newsletter, filled with tips and information on local programs and associations. He and his staff attend meetings and keep in constant contact with community leaders and police.

O'Donnell's district includes an area of Central Long Beach that logged the highest number of aggravated assaults for 2011. LBPD Reporting District No. 464 is bordered by 15th Street to Pacific Coast Highway, and Junipero to Cherry Avenue. It's an area with an extremely transient population, where the average residency is four to five months, and a high number of absentee landlords.

"It's the area where I have my biggest challenges and my biggest successes," O'Donnell said.

The full-time high school teacher and dad said he understands well what is needed for a community to thrive, so he's pushed for more park space in the area, which has lots of children but had little in the way of green spaces. He has also worked to help develop after-school programs, such as the "Digital Academy" through Parks, Recreation and Marine, where kids learn about graphic arts, movie making and digital animation.

"It's designed to keep kids busy, but also to help kids succeed in the future with computer skills that they will need," O'Donnell said.

The neighborhood, he noted, is also an area with a dedicated and active neighborhood association, the West East Side Community Association, which conducts monthly neighborhood and alley clean-ups and meets regularly with residents, police and O'Donnell and his staff.

That dedication will be more important than ever with an extremely dire financial future projected for the city, county and state, police warn.

"We know what's happening with (prisoner) realignment in the state level, mental health is facing cuts as is state health care, and the school district is cutting its budget," Luna said. "When you have all these things lining up you have to start preparing, ... gearing up not only for what's happening now, but also what's in the future.

"I don't want to go back back to the days when we had more than 100 murders a year. No one wants to go back to that."